Why Do You Think You're Above Average?

In 1995 a man robbed two banks in broad daylight with lemon juice on his face, because he was certain it made him invisible to cameras. He had even tested it. The police tape proved him wrong in about four seconds - but nothing inside his own head ever did. That gap, between how good you think you are and how good you are, has been measured for twenty-five years, and the results are stranger than the joke. In this video, we discuss: The Man Who Wore The Juice: McArthur Wheeler, Pittsburgh, January 1995 - the robbery, the Polaroid he used as proof, and the sentence he said to the officers that sent a Cornell psychologist looking for an answer. The 1999 Experiment: Justin Kruger and David Dunning's tests of humour, logic and grammar, why the students in the bottom quarter scored around the 12th percentile and guessed the 62nd, and what the top quarter got wrong in the opposite direction. The Double Curse: Why the skill that lets you do something well is the same skill that lets you judge your own work - so the people with the least of it are hit twice, and feel nothing. The Chart You Have Seen Is Fake: "Mount Stupid" never appeared in the paper. What the real graph looks like, and why twenty years of statisticians - Krueger and Mueller, Ed Nuhfer, Gignac and Zajenkowski - say much of the effect is regression to the mean plus the fact that almost everyone rates themselves above average. 93% Of Drivers And 94% Of Professors: Ola Svenson's 1981 drivers, Patricia Cross's 1977 survey of university teachers, and the 2015 study where self-declared finance experts confidently claimed to know terms that do not exist. What Actually Fixes It: The fourth study in the original paper, ten minutes of training, and four things you can do this week - including why feeling worse as you learn more is the correct shape. This video is for curiosity and education, not a diagnosis of anyone. Sources: Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). "Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121-1134. Dunning, D. (2011). "The Dunning-Kruger effect: On being ignorant of one's own ignorance." Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 247-296. Ehrlinger, J., Johnson, K., Banner, M., Dunning, D., & Kruger, J. (2008). "Why the unskilled are unaware: Further explorations of (absent) self-insight among the incompetent." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 105(1), 98-121. Atir, S., Rosenzweig, E., & Dunning, D. (2015). "When knowledge knows no bounds: Self-perceived expertise predicts claims of impossible knowledge." Psychological Science, 26(8), 1295-1303. Svenson, O. (1981). "Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers?" Acta Psychologica, 47(2), 143-148. Cross, K. P. (1977). "Not can, but will college teaching be improved?" New Directions for Higher Education, 1977(17), 1-15. Krueger, J., & Mueller, R. A. (2002). "Unskilled, unaware, or both? The better-than-average heuristic and statistical regression predict errors in estimates of own performance." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(2), 180-188. Nuhfer, E., Cogan, C., Fleisher, S., Gaze, E., & Wirth, K. (2016). "Random number simulations reveal how random noise affects the measurements and graphical portrayals of self-assessed competency." Numeracy, 9(1), Article 4. Gignac, G. E., & Zajenkowski, M. (2020). "The Dunning-Kruger effect is (mostly) a statistical artefact: Valid approaches to testing the hypothesis with individual differences data." Intelligence, 80, 101449. Fuocco, M. A. (1996). "Trial and error: They had larceny in their hearts, but little in their heads." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 21, 1996. Dunning, D. (2014). "We are all confident idiots." Pacific Standard, October 27, 2014. #psychology #dunningkruger #cognitivebias